Wednesday, September 19, 2012

On a trip to Italy recently I became very
aware of how the French Revolution, and Napoleon Bonaparte in particular, burst
on the scene and overthrew generations of stability with what appeared at the
time to be inspiring revolution and reform.

When Napoleon’s fleet forced its way intoMalta – then the greatest fortress
in Europe – many Maltese ran to their positions at the batteries, only to have
the French knights of the order of St John turn them back because they were
convinced that the impending changes were too wonderful and inspiring to want
to stop. (In actuality the French Revolution, and Napoleon in particular, were
brutal and rapacious looters, and the Maltese people were forced to revolt
within only a few weeks of watching the French pillage their churches and
culture).

Similarly the Doge of the thousand year old
Serene Republic of Venice, when threatened by Napoleon’s forces, surrendered,
and handed his cap of office to a servant commenting “I won’t be needing that
any-more”. This surrender is particularly baffling given that fifty years later
the much poorer and weaker
Venetians threw out their new Austrian masters, and endured a year long seige
with considerable fortitude. The surrender to Napoleon for the Venetians, as
for the Maltese, was again more of a feeling of inevitability than from any
real weakness or fear, and again was instantly regretted as the rapacious
French sacked the great arsenal and looted the churches.

The theme here is that some things that
look both wonderful and inevitable at the time, quite quickly prove to be
appalling mistakes. Such are the case in the foundations of the Republics of
Brazil and Iran.

Brazil was the greatest treasure of the
Portuguese crown, to the point that when the royal family fled there during the
Napoleonic wars, the prince decided to stay when his father returned home, and Brazil became an independent Constitutional Monarchy with a parliamentary system of government along the British model.

Brazil therefore entered a
golden age, where the entire focus of the governments power was upon the
development and improvementof the colony – rather than on looting it for the
benefit of the mother country the way most Catholic empires of the period were
doing. (Catholic conquistadores often claimed they were after converts, but in
practice were seeking loot. Protestant empires tended to be more settle and trade
rather than conquor and loot. Orthodox empires were geographically more attuned
to the ‘keep the barbarians further and further away from our borders’ approach of the Middle
East. And Muslim empires were of course still into the sort of ‘conversion by
the sword’ that the Protestants weren’t any longer, and the Catholics weren’t
supposed to be since the Pope’s ruling against it…)

Brazil’s golden age saw massive advances in
the economy, in education, in human rights for all, and in integrating the
mixed races of the state. Democracy was growing, freedom of the press was
entrenched, and slavery abolished. Things leapt ahead in great bounds for 80
years, and Brazil looked like a better bet than the United States (undergoing a horrible and debilitating civil war as it tried to catch up on getting rid of slavery), for becoming
the great modernising power of the America’s.

But then, tragedy. The Emperor of Brazil
got a good idea. He became fascinated with the advances in democracy in various
parts of the world, and went out of his way to encourage his nascent
constitutional monarchy parliament to remove him and declare a proper Republic.
He felt that this was both a wonderful and inevitable step, and that he should
not stand in its way. In fact there was little desire amongst the general
population for any change, but the new elites of chattering classes were
delighted to play with new power. (Though, as in the US revolution, slave
owners who wanted to keep their slaves played a dominant role in the ‘reform’.)

Over the next century Brazil became apathetic backwater, and suffered a series of appalling dictatorships. The economy
crumbled into a basket case, the rule of law was lost, freedom of the press
smashed, human rights dissolved, and conflict between the racial groups became
endemic. Within a couple of decades the advances of a century were reversed,
and a new system of repression and economic disadvantage locked into place for
several generations.

Hooray for a foreward thinker.

In fact had the Emperor of Brazil kept a
firm hand on the development of his parliamentary system over several decades,
gradually increasing the voter base as property franchise and education
improved along with general literacy and the rule of law, then Brazil might
have continued to outpace the United States in the America’s. Instead he abandoned an only
partly developed system to the mercies of a newly emerging chattering class
BEFORE the rest of the citizens had developed the necessary understanding of
structure and cynicism of politicial motive to be able to control the new
elite. The result was what it always is, elected dictatorships followed by
military coups, followed by violent rebellions, followed by more dictatorships,
etc. (Suprisingly, it was one of the military governments that eventually got
sick of the whole thing and started to re-impose a democratic system… but this
time slowly and carefully ove the course of decades!)

A similar thing happened in the great hope
of the Middle East, Iran.

Many of the small independent states of the
Middle East granted self government in the last sixty years were tribal groups
that worked best under their own traditional monarchs. They would take many
years to develop the necessary education, literacy, and rule of law to start
pushing towards functional constitutional monarchies (in fact Morrocco and
Jordan and some of the Gulf Emirates are only now working towards this
properly). Unfortunately several other states were forcibly constituted under
monarchs who had little direct tribal association with large elements of the
population, and these (particularly Iraq) have always been unstable, either as
monarchies or as republics. But not any worse than many roughly structured
Republics with similar problems (like Turkey and Syria and Libya).

Iran however, should not have had this
problem. The ancient Persian culture was still dominant and strong, and the
Shah was from a family with great history and loyalty. Minorities were not
persecuted the way they were in other Muslim cultures, and their economy was
booming. In fact Iran in the early years of the twentieth century was looking as
promising as Brazil had a century earlier. It's 1908 Constitutional Monarchy and Parliament structure being a potential model for the entire Middle East on the route to modern statehood.

Yet again, the rulers are largely at fault for what happened next. Shahs' dropped the ball. They overestimated the advances in democracy, and
underestimated that backwardness and ignorance of many of the citizens. They tried to structure a new style state before the population had the
sophistication and education and cynicism to be ready for it. They finished with a parliament of shallow new chattering elites, willing to try foolish things that looked exciting or inevitable. One Shah had to be deposed for being too pro-German in World War Two. (Fascism looks exciting and inevitable....) His son was possibly even worse. He encouraged his parliament to nationalise foreign assets (Nationalism looks exciting and inevitable...), and the British and Americans reacted badly and instigated coups (the first recognisable modern US coup against a democratically elected government) and interventions that led to eventual collapse of the still underdeveloped political system. The Shah turned for a while to US support (scoring cold war brownie points looks like the way to go....), but the crisis grew worse over the next quarter century, and eventually ongoing debacles led to a final coup.

The result,
inevitably, was that modern Iran is a particularly nasty theocratic
dictatorship that has fallen economically decades behind its previously
pathetic neighboure, and survives now on the sort of paranoia and irrational
fear that used to represent the Soviet Union (and still apparently represents those other great republics... Russia and China and North Korea).

Iran went from being the shining hope of
democracy and civilisation in the Middle East to being a basket case that has
been economically completely overshadowed by the previously despised and backward tiny
Emirates across the gulf. It went that way because the Shahs', like the Emperor of
Brazil, and like the French Knights of St John or the Venetian council, fell
for the concept of wonderful and inevitable advances, without realising that
slow and cautious development is a necessary underpinning to any permanent
advance.

Similar things happened in many other
places that were thrown into ‘independence’ before devolping more than a
rudimentary chattering class of lawyers and civil servant elites. If the
literacy and education of the vast majority of citizens was not up to the
idealism of the small and overly confident new elites, those countries were doomed
to even nastier dictatorships than Brazil and Iran. (See almost anywhere in
Africa for example.)

Worse, many states fell to a particularly horrendous political 'shiny new toy', Communism, that usually inflicted economic chaos, and indeed slaughter and injustice, on its own citizens, beyond the wildest dreams of Ghenghis Khan (all in the name of being exciting and modern and inevitable of course...)

Democracy can be a wonderful part of a
functioning constitutional system, but only if it is developed slowly over
decades or centuries within a literate population, with a rule of law, a free
press, and a firm understanding of cynicism in relation to political promises.
Otherwise, overly enthusiastic institution of democracy within a largely
illiterate and uneducated culture with little experience of rule of law, and
virtually no understanding of the cynicism necessary to deal with the
ridiculuous promises of professional politicians: leads to very horrible
results.

The worst enemy of developing a stable democracy, is
pushing it too fast.

The result of people who have been given
responsibility for nurturing the development of a country thinking they can
take exciting short-cuts, is inevitably appalling.

About Me

A professional historian and educator challenges some assumptions.
(A sometimes tongue-in-cheek polemic, with a Socratic emphasis on challenging people to argue back. Please do so... I make some of it outrageous largely to encourage a debate).